Racketeers shocked by woman who fought back

Dr Dora Akunyili's determination to confront corruption means she has to travel with 10 armed guards after several attempts on her life.

She shocked Nigeria's fake drug racketeers by taking the fight to them after becoming director-general of the country's food and drug agency, Nafdac, in 2001.

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Bureaucratic inertia and rampant corruption meant the drugs regulator had not been effective, and she had to sack 300 of its 3,000 staff, including her brother-in-law, to get a grip on the corruption. She has hired women because men are "more susceptible to corruption".

Trained as a pharmac-eutical scientist, she is now a crime fighter. Her sister, a diabetic, died after taking fake insulin in 1988, before doctors and the authorities became aware of the counterfeiting problem.

Dr Akunyili, who has become a national hero, says of fake medicine: "It is one of the greatest atrocities of our time. It is mass-murder. It is a form of terrorism."

Such is the danger from the drugs gangs that her husband, a doctor, also requires guards and her youngest child was sent to the US after a kidnapping attempt. Nafdac's offices and laboratories have been hit by co-ordinated bomb attacks, destroying equipment and records.

She says: "It's not done by all Nigerians. It's done by very few murderers that have been living off the blood of people for many, many years and felt that nobody should stop them. It didn't really occur to me that these people would fight to this level."

Dr Akunyili's car has also been ambushed and she had a miraculous escape when a bullet burned her scalp. A nearby bus driver was killed in the attack.

The Nafdac staff carry out raids in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, twice a week to seize the bogus medicine, which is then destroyed in fires. But even then, people have been arrested trying to snatch boxes of drugs from the flames.

The 52-year-old official says: "We have another problem of lack of or inadequate legislation. Because the laws against drug counterfeiting are weak and it is at the same time as lucrative as other criminal activities, criminals are now shifting from gun-running and carrying of cocaine and heroin and other hard drugs, to counterfeiting of medicines."

She has called for international legislation to make mandatory the reporting of fake drugs, in line with other industries.

She says: "Drug companies, I can tell you without any fear of contradiction, most of them are more interested in their money. They are much more interested in their money than in the health of the people. Understandably, they are in business. But they forget that this is a business that affects life."